We're a family that believes you can do things your own way, and this blog is about our adventures doing just that. We try to spend our money thriftily, be healthy, make things instead of buying them, enjoy the simple pleasures of life, and raise our kids to have values that go against the flow of what they're taught by zombie Hitler. Actually just the things they learn from a consumer-oriented world, but that's bad too.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

My daughter Erin loves watching Youtube videos of Life Hacks being tested so when a friend (Hey Brittnnie!) started a Life Hack testing group on Facebook I was quick to join. The aim being to see if these Life Hacks actually work or not.

Since then we've done a few tests that I'm going to share here too.

We tried this and I'm not convinced. Supposedly doing this will make your drink colder quicker. We did one with a wet paper towel and one without. They were both about the same temperature after 15 minutes in the freezer which was not quite cold enough.

Verdict - FAIL.

We tried this one because our daughter Leigh loves Oreos. We had a few incidents of putting the fork in making the Oreo break in half but apart from that it was a success. You can dunk an entire Oreo at once which is nice.

Verdict - PASS.

This is a great tip. Hulling strawberries is really easy and unmessy this way. I used to work in a bakery where they used tons of strawberries in the summer so everyone had to occasionally help out hulling them. Your fingers would be red (and grossly sticky) after doing just a few. I'll use this method from now on.

Saturday, April 11, 2015

We were nowhere near organised enough to be having this for breakfast so we had it for lunch instead. I made the bubble part earlier, boiling potatoes and cabbage then mashing them together with some mustard and chopped spring onions. Form into a patty shape and they're ready to be fried.

Nearer lunch time we fried some eggs, grilled some bacon, toasted the bread buns and fried the bubble patties. Then you just assemble the sandwich and it's ready to eat.

Everything was easy to make except the bubble patties. We're notoriously unsuccessful at frying any kind of potato-based patty. It resulted in them being a bit soft and falling out of the sandwich as we ate it. Overall though the sandwich was great. Bacon and eggs go well together and the mustardy flavour of the bubble patty added a nice spiciness to the sandwich. Toasted bread buns give a lovely texture to the sandwich too.

Ratings: JD - 3.5, Emma - 3

No Saturday Sandwiches for the next two weeks as JD is visiting his family in America and doesn't want to miss any sandwich action. :)

Thursday, April 9, 2015

This game is set in a Post-Apocalyptic world where food is scarce. You have a mouth board and each turn you must eat something by chewing it with chew tokens to survive. Some foods give you Glory leading you towards the goal of 7 Glory points.

There are food cards split into either food or condiments. They're all really unlikely foods. Leigh's favourite is the cute little tapeworm.

It's a quick game to set up and took about 3 minutes. It's a simple game to play and fun. Kind of gross with all the spewing unwanted food from your mouth into someone else's but that adds to the quirky charm of the game.

I like the little weird guys you move along the Glory track (displayed below on my mouth).

The game is quite quick to play. This game took us 35 minutes but we were teaching Leigh how to play. JD and I have played games that took about 15 minutes.

It's basically a card game where you have to get rid of your cards quickly (to gain glory points) and also sabotage your opponents (to stop them getting glory points).

Erin lost interest quickly when we played so I'd say this game is more suited to teenagers and adults (or younger kids with a better attention span who wouldn't rather be on the Xbox).

Leigh said she enjoyed playing it because she won and she thinks it's funny that there's only one reasonable food item in the whole game (a Twinkie).

JD said it's a fun game and he enjoys the weird foods like the Box of Spiders. He also likes the art style.

Saturday, April 4, 2015

The Dagwood sandwich comes from an American comic called Blondie where her husband makes these huge sandwiches.

We've been really looking forward to this sandwich all week. It contains many of our favourite sandwich components. I've even been singing about it..."Oh, the Dagwood sandwich is a-comin' on over the hiiiillllll" :D

So basically it's a huge sandwich layered in between 4 slices of rye bread with cheese, tomato, dill pickles, many cooked meats and topped with olives.

And, turns out, it's impossible to eat! There's no way to get a taste of the whole sandwich at once so you just have to attack it as best you can and kind of gnaw away at it until it's gone.

It defeated me. I'd had enough of eating it before I'd finished.

It tastes good but it's just too much sandwich at once. JD said a sandwich half the size would've been much better and he's right. There was too much meat (twss), too much cheese and it was difficult to enjoy different parts of the sandwich because of all the tastes going on. It does look great though.